


A Curtain Call

by dawngloaming



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Codependency, Depression, Drabble, Love Confessions, M/M, Mental Health Issues, One Shot, Possibly Unrequited Love, Self-Harm, Short One Shot, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-31 14:13:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20116405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawngloaming/pseuds/dawngloaming
Summary: This is an alternate version of my one-shot, A Comedian in a Tragedy. Both stories revolve around Joker in complete despair, tired of playing by the rules of his game with Batman. The rules of hatred and violence. He decides to quit the game entirely. Perhaps it is a cry for help, finally. It's a plan that isn't very thought out, but it breaks the rules he and Batman have lived by, so his actions come as a shock.





	A Curtain Call

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly, sorry that this is SO Joker centric. Not much input from Bruce, here.  
Secondly, forgive me if this is unrealistic, what with the dancing while bleeding out...monologuing and yelling while bleeding out...  
But you know, Joker seems to be able to take a lot of blood loss and still remain standing, in the comics. Because comic logic?

The rain was pouring hard and fast, milky in the black night. The droplets magnified the orange of street lamps in that quiet midnight way...creating a scene both warm and cold...melancholy and nostalgic. The Joker was immersed in the hissing torrent, yet he still stood out clear as day, clear as a lighthouse in a storm. Bruce saw him, just a little ways off, standing head tilted down as bright green strands blackened from moisture hung into his face. His silk-wrapped hands gripped the edge of a rooftop...the pose was incredibly pensive. Yet what could he be thinking of? 

The downpour obscured the bat’s view of the other man, just a bit, but he could see the Joker well enough to instantly know it was him. How could he not, when he stood out so starkly: stock still, framed in the night like the moon above, pearlescent. Batman grappled to the other roof as soon as he spotted him, acting on instinct before he could even think. 

Nothing had happened that night on patrol, the Joker had been quiet, so the dark knight had figured he wouldn’t be hearing that iconic and ear grating laugh tonight...and yet there he was, just a reach away. Seeing him now, and hearing the roar of rain and silence instead of that customary, raucous laughter...was disconcerting to say the least. The Joker was, well...not doing anything really. He was so immersed in all that nothing that he didn’t even react to the sound of heavy boots approaching from behind. 

The bat’s stomach lurched. He sensed something was very VERY wrong the moment he saw the clown. The smell of blood mingled with the dirty-fresh scent of rain over pavement. There was a slick burgundy puddle forming on the ledge upon which the flamboyant villain was leaning, peering down at the streets. Perhaps in search of his kevlar-clad hero, that man who acted as a double edged sword, which he loved to wield against himself. 

A blood-slathered knife sat inches from the tense fingers. It was apparent that the wrists of those once-white gloves were soaked red, the color bleeding in thin veins down the rest of the fabric. He rushed closer, again on an impulse, and grabbed a thin wrist. “JOKER” he shouted in a tense rasp, accidentally squeezing down, causing the clown to tense with a cringe. 

The thin man turned slowly, exposing a face Bruce had never seen on him. A face of genuinely transparent emotion. It was streaked in black eye makeup, lashes clumped. His cheeks, the tip of his aquiline nose, his quivering lips, all flushed the same red as his bloodshot eyes... and without any of the usual blush or lipstick to create such an effect. The color stood out in stark relief against skin that was, otherwise, unusually ashen, even for Joker. It wasn’t its usual milky color, it was a dreadful shade, on the border between gray and white. In a flash, the vulnerability painted across that sickly face was erased...though it was wiped away somewhat sloppily. Despite the mask of manic grinning, which was hastily slapped back in place, those peridot-green eyes lacked all their regular mirth and viciousness. 

The vigilante couldn’t believe that whatever THIS was...was the doing of his nemesis. It looked like a suicide attempt. And that couldn’t be possible. He still vividly remembered those words from long ago. The words that plagued him during many sleepless nights at the manor.

"You know, Bats...you’ll never get rid of me. Only YOU can kill me. No one else can, not even me. It’s simply not ALLOWED! It isn’t written." Those were HIS words. 

Yes, surely someone ELSE had done this to him. It didn’t matter that no one would try to murder a man by slitting his wrists, leaving him standing freely in the rain to die. Nothing mattered except MAKING SENSE of this situation which felt entirely fake and wrong. Like a dream. Bruce was going to force the puzzle pieces to fit, if he had to. 

“Who did this to you, what did you get into NOW” growled the bat, white eyes widening and betraying an alarm that his gruff, modulated voice couldn’t convey. With a theatrical yet shaky and full bodied sigh, the response flowed from those red lips with rehearsed eloquence. An eloquence that, like the rest of Joker's performance tonight, came with an ease that lacked truth. There was a weary tone that the grisly smile couldn't conceal. The words flowed from him like his leaking blood, like the life draining from his ever the more ashen face. The confession began quick and sure, but as the words fell out, the smile fell off, twitching and stuttering to a stop despite futile attempts to replace it.

The pale man roughly clasped hands with those of the glowering figure before him, and guided one of the gloved fists to rest at his waist. It was a dancing position, fit for a waltz. The bat didn't protest, he was still too busy trying to force the puzzle to come together as a picture that he could believe.

“Batsy, Batsy, BATSY" the Joker almost whined. There was a desperate yearning sneaking through his eyes as little pupils expanded into pitch, much like the black cape that whipped and billowed around the two dancers. "You know...well, maybe you don't remember, always...but I’m not happy on every goddamn day of my godforsaken life. I'm not always MANIC, to borrow some Arkham shrink-speak.” He threw up sarcastic jazz hands and rolled his eyes, grimacing. 

“My life is nothing but highs, and lows. I have you to thank for the hilarious highs, of course, ever since my chemical baptism! But...read in between the punchlines," he drawled with a taunting smirk, "...and you’ll see sad, blank, white spaces...stretching on and on, nothing to fill them,” he continued. His eyes glazed over, stared somewhere past the shielded gaze that faced him. 

“In the gaps, there is no noise, no color...no YOU.” The slow dance paused here, for a beat. And now there was a glance, a deep trembling inhale, eyes ever greener from the contrast of popped blood vessels. 

“In those spaces...there’s barely even a ME, without US. I don't really exist when i'm not living for you, bringing death to you... killing for you." At this, the clown prince, although he wasn't leading, brought them to an abrupt stop and dipped the batman with a surprising strength. His eyes flared to burning life for the second he held, leering down at his dance partner with mixed emotions that flickered past, like channels on a television. 

"I go through the motions...like im on a stage. I KNOW you know how this feels. But just like you do, when we’re together, I forget I'm just an...actor.” The last word was a whisper. A tender, rueful smile quirks the thin lips ever so slightly, crinkles the glossy wet eyes. “With you...hell, I'm the whole damn stage, and you’re the whole damn play. And there is no play without a stage, you know.”

“Of course you know,” he went on. “You know that when we dance, I become a vehicle for YOU. You might not realize it...though I hope you do, on some level...but I LET you LEAD! Just like I am, right now. When we dance, with all those kicks and leaps and bloodied teeth... it may not look like it, but I let you lead, EVERY time. Because I KNOW you can stop me, no matter what I do. And I want you to, I need you to. If you don’t stop me, if you don’t pin my hands behind my back, there’s no more game, no more us, no more ANYthing.” His soft-violet eyelids lowered to half mast with another sigh. 

"I’m not sentimental about life, clearly...certainly not the lives of others, oh heavens no. But not my own either. I dont think I'm special. But the feeling that being alive with you gives me? It’s a feeling that needs ME to hold it. I don’t mind killing me...but I hate to kill that feeling, that heartbeat you give me." He leaned his chest into the broader armored one, and tilted his face so close that the bat could feel his breath. It’s the only warmth present in the cold night, aside from their grasping hands. 

"That damn heartbeat...IT feels like it wants to live for itself. That HEARTBEAT wants to grow and envelop all of gotham, all of the world...envelop it all in that damn POUNDING, while you pound into my face with your fists." 

This time Bruce is the one to slow the two to a stop. He stares, eyes twitching across the Joker's entire face from under the cowl. No lies can be detected. The bleeding man leans his forehead against the sturdy chest in front of him and continues to speak, this time with an urgent tone. The bony hands moved upward to grasp at the hero's neck, pawing softly enough that it elicits little tension from the other. 

"But you see, Batsy...Bruce...I know how you need me, how I alone can make you feel this alive." Bruce wonders if his enemy can read his mind...he always seems to know exactly what Bruce is feeling, despite his notoriously low empathy. While he wondered the clown simply turned to rest a cheek against that stable chest, hands trailing down and over his armored pectorals.

"I know how I can draw your darkness out into to the light where it can breathe, where it won’t choke you alive. I know all this the way I know I LOVE you. With certainty I never feel about anything in my meaningless, memory-jumbled existence." Bruce doesn't dare look down, but he swears he feels the faintest kiss through the kevlar. 

"Hell, it’s so obvious Selina can see it, Harley can see it...everyone but you. Because you don’t WANT it." The soft cloying voice grated the sentence out with a renewed intensity, as silken hands almost attempt to claw past the suit. 

"Sure, I get your blood pumpin to all the right places" he purred sardonically…"but you still hate me," he whined in a pitiful tone. "You hate me more than you love me, at least. Oh you’d never kill me, you have your codes...and ohhh you’d mourn if someone else where to end our little game FOR you...after all, I’ve consumed your time to the point I AM the watch on your wrist, the clock in the tower." Joker pushed back from Bruce, backing up with an unsteady sway. 

There were smears of his own blood on the black armor. Bruce reached out to pull him back in, but Joker flicked out a new knife from his pocket, waving the hero away, backing up all the while as the other man crept forward. "You’d mourn the time spent and lost, at the very least. But you’d eventually decide it was allll for the best." Joker flicked the knife with a flippant wrist and a sneer. 

"Ultimately, my death could be excused for the sake of the little gothamites, the little shadow people you dream into color...Hell, I could be their sacrificial lamb." He swept his arms out, pulling in a knee. It was a mockery of the crucified Christ, smiling shaky and grotesque. "And well! For years I thought...no matter, it's fine!" There was a slash of metal through air, tears bubbling back up, a voice thickening with choked back sobs. 

"For YEARS I thought...no, FELT...believeeeed, that hate was more than enough...I could live off it. But now...I need something more. And I see the cat ready to swipe that something from under my nose, like a tablecloth under her claws, sending the glass to crash upon the floor. She’s ready to LOVE you, the way you’ve craved all your life." Bruce looked down as the Joker dropped to his knees, palms spread up like an offering, an incredulous smile dancing onto sob-swollen lips. 

"She’ll fill the cavern the BAT was born from. She’ll fill it with the light of day and we all know bats are NOCTURNAL. The bat will leave, and he’s all I have. I can’t hold the man the way he needs to be held, I’m just blood for his BAT. And even if she DOESN’T kill the Batman….my Batman...she’ll take up all the place in your heart till there’s nothing left for me, not even that damned hatred that pulls you out into the night.” Joker heaved with a shudder and shouted to the ground he began to clutch at.

"But I DON’T KNOW HOW TO LOVE YOU! NOT IN A WAY THAT WILL KEEP YOU! KEEP YOU WHERE I CAN EVEN TRY TO REALLY LOVE YOU!" 

Joker smoothed his shaking hands gently over Bruce's face, now that he had begun to kneel as well. Joker's hands left bright smears in the wake of the caress, trailing down the cowl as he moved to hold a chiseled chin in his palms. 

“I'm getting out of your hair forever, Batsy. So give me this. Give me the comfort of knowing you'll remember me...all of me. Even this. All the pathetic shreds that I can give...before I leave. I want you to watch me go." And with that, he slowly slumped against the masked man, slumped into his arms. They are the spitting image of Michelangelo’s “Pieta”. 

The rain had become incredibly loud.

**Author's Note:**

> Once again. This is a Joker whose mania is one side of a coin, the other side being depression.


End file.
